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I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have

I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.

serbuvlad 11d ago
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA. Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
- bigyabai 11d ago
  I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed. Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
  - serbuvlad 11d ago
    This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games. It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance. I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them. And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
    - bigyabai 10d ago
      That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does). Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does. > why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code? Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks. Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
      - serbuvlad 10d ago
        From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever. I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea). But let's say they provide (1). Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
        bigyabai 10d ago
        I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton. (2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support. > Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.

serbuvlad 11d ago

I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA. Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.

bigyabai 11d ago
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed. Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
- serbuvlad 11d ago
  This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games. It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance. I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them. And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
  - bigyabai 10d ago
    That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does). Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does. > why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code? Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks. Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
    - serbuvlad 10d ago
      From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever. I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea). But let's say they provide (1). Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
      - bigyabai 10d ago
        I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton. (2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support. > Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.